it down good, then carefully pulling their feet out, leaving perfect toad dwellings, suitable to accommodate the pickiest of toads.
It was about three o’clock when John Moses started feeling a serious need for a drink. He’d been fighting the feeling ever since he woke up, and he’d thought he was winning the battle, but all of a sudden his fighting spirit waned, and he decided what could it hurt, he wasn’t going to drink himself into a stupor after all he was too happy for that. So he got to his feet and announced, ceremoniously, that he had to go to the bathroom.
All his kids looked at all his other kids, and the looks they were giving each other were looks of dread. John Moses couldn’t help noticing.
“Anybody find anything wrong with that?” he demanded. After all, he had just as much right to go to the bathroom as anyone else.
Nobody made a sound.
John said, “Well, if nobody has any objections …,” and he took off for the house.
No one said anything for a minute or so. They just sat there looking as if they’d been waked up from a good dream. Then Alvis said, “Well, sonofabitch. I thought for a while there we had it made.”
Willadee was chewing a hole in her lip, trying to decide whether or not to follow her daddy and head him off before he could get drunk and ruin the reunion. But then she remembered the beers she’d had the night before, and the pleasant grogginess that had followed, and she thought, Maybe he won’t ruin anything, maybe he’ll just relax a little, and go to sleep, and that will be the end of that. She stayed put in her lawn chair.
Calla stood up and got herself a clean paper plate. “I don’t believe I’ve tasted Eudora’s friendship cake,” she said. “Anybody else want a piece of Eudora’s friendship cake while I’m up?”
John went through the house and into the bar, and he sat down on the first barstool he came to. Giving in and having a drink wasn’t something he wanted to do today. He wanted to make them all proud of him. They had seemed proud of him all afternoon.
By the time he poured the first two fingers of Johnnie Walker into a glass and drank it down, he had come to realize that every one of them (except for Willadee, who was above reproach) had been stringing him along, in order to manipulate him into staying sober. He poured three fingers the next time, instead of two. Willadee’s face seemed to be swimming before him, so he squenched his eyes closed, trying to shut her out.
“Willadee, you just get on out of here,” he commanded, but she refused to leave.
“I said get out of here, Willadee. You and I can have a beer and talk about this, after everybody else is gone.”
When he opened his eyes, the image of Willadee had disappeared.
“Where’s Walter?” John Moses asked. He had just come from the bar back through the house, and from the house out onto the side porch. The porch was full of people, and the yard was running over with people, and altogether, it was more people than John could deal with comfortably, since he was looking for just one face, and it was nowhere to be seen.
It got so quiet even the wind quit blowing.
“I said, where’s Walter?” John bellowed.
Toy was sitting in the porch swing with his arm around his wife, Bernice, who was outlandishly pretty, even though she was thirty-five years old and ought to be starting to fade.
Toy left Bernice and came over beside the old man. “Walter’s not here today, Daddy.”
“The devil you say.” John’s words were slurring into one another. “Walter wouldn’t miss a Moses reunion.”
Then John remembered why Walter wasn’t there. “You shouldn’t have let him go to work, Toy. You shouldn’t have ever let him go when he wasn’t feeling good, and you knew it.”
Toy got a sick look on his face. “You’re right, Daddy. I know that.”
John said, “Split open, like a slaughtered—”
But he didn’t get to finish. Calla had come up the steps and stood facing him.
“Why don’t you and me just go inside and take us a rest?” she asked. Which changed the world John Moses was living in. All of a sudden, he wasn’t thinking about Walter anymore. He was thinking about the fact that he’d been sleeping alone for more than a decade.
“What?” he ripped out, raucous-sounding. “You’re saying you wanta go roll around in the old marriage bed?”
Calla just stood there. Wordless. Her lips going white. Out in the yard, relatives and nonrelatives began skittering around, loading up kids and leftover food. There was a storm brewing, and they wanted to be gone before it hit.
John hollered, “Where the hell you folks going? Don’t you know it’s not nice to eat and run?” But they kept leaving, like salt dribbling out of an overturned shaker. It was getting sparse out there.
Calla said, “John, quit making a fool of yourself.”
“I’ll make of myself what I damn well please,” John informed her. “I am a self-made man.” He did a lurching sort of dance step and nearly fell off the porch.
“You are a self-made jackass,” she muttered under her breath.
That’s when John Moses slapped her. The sound rang out, and Willadee came running across the yard. Pushing people aside. She stepped in between her mother and father and looked John Moses dead in the eye.
“I—am so—ashamed of you,” she said to him. Her voice was shaking.
That sobered John up. He looked back at Willadee for what seemed like eternity extended. Then he turned on his heel and walked inside the house.
Nobody felt much like visiting anymore. They all just hung there for a little bit, wishing none of this was happening. Willadee was patting her mother’s arm, but she was staring at the door John Moses had walked through. All at once, she knew what was about to happen, just as surely as if a voice had come out of the sky and told her. She took a quick step toward the door.
“Daddy!” she cried out, sharp and clear, but not one soul heard her say it, because the gunshot was as loud as a big clap of thunder.
Chapter 4
The first hour was the worst. Willadee’s brothers kept the women out of the house, but Willadee saw it all just as vividly in her mind as if she’d been the one to find the body. For the rest of her life, she would be pushing that picture back, fighting it, hating it. Trying to reduce the dimensions. Dull down the colors. She would never succeed.
She allowed herself to be led over to a chair in the yard, but she could not sit still. She leapt to her feet and crammed her fingers in her mouth to keep from wailing. Then someone took her arm and walked her in circles, from the porch to the well to the garden to the porch. Circles. Talking. Gentle words, pouring, one on top of another, running together. More circles. Later on, Willadee would be unable to remember who this person was who saved her from hysteria.
“My fault,” Willadee said to whoever it was.
“Hush,
